HUAWEI mobile connect - USB Fake driver

Two days ago I have bought mobile internet for my laptop from Swisscom (the biggest swiss telco company), and I have got a HUAWEI modem for that.

I went home happily and installed the  "Unlimited Data Manager". After the installation it prompted me to restart and I said yes. Well, the first bad sign was, that after the restart my Windows 7 machine just showed me a black screen. After waiting for a while I have forced the computer to shut down and I have started it again. This time it has started but when I plugged in my beautiful new HUAWEI modem it was not recognized correctly (in the device manager I saw HUAWEU mobile connect - 3G USB Fake) and I had no access to the internet.

As a blond girl my first attempt was to restart the machine. Well, the second symptom was that my machine did not want to shut down any more. After waiting for a while it just  crashed while shutting down (blue screen, dumping physical memory to disk....).

Then my machine did not really want to start. I took him ages. If the modem was plugged in while starting then at least it was properly recognized. But if I took it out and then put it back nothing again.

So all in all the situation looked like the following: I could connect with my HUAWEI modem to the internet only if I have freshly restarted my machine while the modem was plugged in. However my machine got sick somehow and it did not want to shut down nor did it want to turn on so a restart took half an hour at least (and this is not exaggeration at all....). 

So after two days of struggling, almost getting a nervous breakdown, crying a bit, wanting to throw my machine out the window and so on I have found the solution. I have found it here, but it is deeply buried in the comments, and I thought that it definitely deserves to be in a blog post.

So the reason why my HUAWEI modem drivers could not be installed correctly, is that I have also some VMware products installed on my machine. Apparently VMware and HUAWEI modem do not like each other at all.

The solution was to stop the following service: VMware USB Arbitration Service. I did not only stop it, but set the startup type to manual. Then I have rebooted my system once again, and this time it was willing to shut down and turn on again. After my machine was up, I plugged in the modem, and the drivers were successfully installed and I could connect to the internet. After that I was so happy that I thought I will write a whole blog post about it. :)